Quote #47

He was the first Chancellor of the Exchequer who ever made the Budget interesting. 'He talked shop,' it was said, 'like a tenth muse.' He could apply all the resources of a glowing rhetoric to the most prosaic questions of cost and profit; could make beer romantic and sugar serious. He could sweep the widest horizon of the financial future, and yet stoop to bestow the minutest attention on the microcosm of penny stamps and the monetary merits of half-farthings.

More from William Ewart Gladstone

  1. I saw in the face of Mr. Gladstone a blending of opposite qualities. There were the peace and gentleness of the lamb, with the strength and…
  2. If you were to put that man on a moor with nothing on but his shirt, he would become whatever he pleased.
  3. The defects of his strength grow on him. All black is very black, all white very white.
  4. I don't object to Gladstone always having the ace of trumps up his sleeve, but merely to his belief that the Almighty put it there.
  5. Gladstone will soon have it all his own way and whenever he gets my place we shall have strange doings.
  6. The greatest Chancellor of all time.
  7. If there were no Tories, I am afraid he would invent them.
  8. They told me how Mr. Gladstone read Homer for fun, which I thought served him right.

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